Monday, December 29, 2008
Friday, December 26, 2008
$250 Off Your First Month's Rent -- Spanish Speakers Only, No Gringos!
By Princeton Property Management
Reply to: hous-970297252@craigslist.org [?]
Date: 2008-12-26, 12:23PM PST
PostingID: 970297252
Orchards - Apartment Rentals in Canby , Oregon — Princeton Property Management
Unhappy Princeton Property Management renter Gregoria Munoz, and her 13-year-old daughter, Perla. Mrs. Munoz does not speak English.
By Princeton Property Management
$695 / 2br - Grande Especial Festivo (canby)
Reply to: hous-970297252@craigslist.org [?]
Date: 2008-12-26, 12:23PM PST
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- Location: canby
- it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
Orchards - Apartment Rentals in Canby , Oregon — Princeton Property Management
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Unhappy Princeton Property Management renter Gregoria Munoz, and her 13-year-old daughter, Perla. Mrs. Munoz does not speak English.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Enlarge
Police officers and forensic scientists at the spot where Patrick McGee was attacked and killed
A wheelie bin next door to Mr McGee's house in the Crumpsall area of Greater Manchester
Police outside the house where the body was found in Crumpsall, Manchester
Symbol of Order or Impotence?
Sunday, December 21, 2008
The Greatness of The Lion King
By Nicholas Stix
There is one thing about The Lion King that is great, or had a hand in something very good, or at least was somewhere, vaguely present when something good occurred. Based on the corporate cartoon feature’s title, Susan Warms Dryfoos (yeah, she’s a New York Times Dryfoos), was inspired to entitle her documentary on the life and work of the greatest caricaturist of them all, Al Hirschfeld, The Line King.
By Nicholas Stix
There is one thing about The Lion King that is great, or had a hand in something very good, or at least was somewhere, vaguely present when something good occurred. Based on the corporate cartoon feature’s title, Susan Warms Dryfoos (yeah, she’s a New York Times Dryfoos), was inspired to entitle her documentary on the life and work of the greatest caricaturist of them all, Al Hirschfeld, The Line King.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Are “Rod Blagojevich” and “George Stephanopolous” the Same Man?
By Nicholas Stix
Have these “two” men ever been seen together in the same room, in real time? Look at the pictures, and decide for yourself.
“Rod”
“George”
By Nicholas Stix
Have these “two” men ever been seen together in the same room, in real time? Look at the pictures, and decide for yourself.
“Rod”
“George”
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Join Max Blumenthal and Keith Olbermann, in Having a Very VDARE Christmas!
By Nicholas Stix
Maxie
Herr Olbermann
Max Blumenthal and Keith Olbermann have done everything in their power, of late, to publicize VDARE.com. Granted, Blumenthal’s PR work has consisted of pronouncing a political death sentence against VDARE editor-publisher Peter Brimelow as a “white nationalist,” a code phrase for neo-Nazi, but you know what they say: There's no such thing as bad publicity. (Don’t worry, Peter, more prominent gauleiters than Max Blumenthal call me the same thing, and I’m sure Max’ll eventually get around to me, as well). Blumenthal has variously misrepresented, or plum screwed up in his descriptions of what VDARE contributors like Tom Piatak have written, and Olbermann has been content largely to parrot him, but what do you expect? It’s not like they’re journalists. So, they quote Piatak as saying “Jews,” when he really said, “multiculturalists”? Same difference, right?
Blumenthal is the purported son of former Clinton administration employee, Sidney Blumenthal, then affectionately referred to as “Sid Vicious.” During the 1996 presidential campaign, Sid was stationed at the DNC’s New Yorker Division, from where he would call Bob Dole (Viagra-KS) Campaign HQ, posing as a journalist. The Dole folks would tell Blumenthal things they wouldn’t have told a known Democratic Party operative (no wonder Dole lost the election!). Sid would then immediately call Clinton Re-election HQ, and pass on whatever he had just learned.
(But that’s the least of Sid’s viciousness. Read Michael Isikoff’s note at the bottom of this review of Sid’s apparently unreadable and uninformative, 802-page book, for how Vicious, er, Blumenthal, lied to the media about both the grand jury’s questions and his testimony in the matter of Bill Clinton’s perjury, in order to make himself look good, and to libel Kenneth Starr.)
Max is also employed by the Party, at its Daily Beast Division, another project by Democratic serial magazine killer, Tina Brown, who was busy wrecking the New Yorker Division’s finances, when she and Sid were both there. Like purported father, like purported son.
Although Max looks like a soccer hooligan, I know nothing about his demeanor, or whether he is prone to violence. For all I know, he may well limit his thuggery to his typing.
Keith Olbermann is a retired sportscaster, who is presently employed by the Party’s MSNBC Division. His chief talent resides in having a very loud voice, with which to shout his talking points.
For all that Max and Keith said, in publicizing VDARE, there is, however, one thing that they forgot to say: Please support VDARE!
VDARE is sponsored by the VDARE Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity; your contributions are tax-deductible.
By Nicholas Stix
Maxie
Herr Olbermann
Max Blumenthal and Keith Olbermann have done everything in their power, of late, to publicize VDARE.com. Granted, Blumenthal’s PR work has consisted of pronouncing a political death sentence against VDARE editor-publisher Peter Brimelow as a “white nationalist,” a code phrase for neo-Nazi, but you know what they say: There's no such thing as bad publicity. (Don’t worry, Peter, more prominent gauleiters than Max Blumenthal call me the same thing, and I’m sure Max’ll eventually get around to me, as well). Blumenthal has variously misrepresented, or plum screwed up in his descriptions of what VDARE contributors like Tom Piatak have written, and Olbermann has been content largely to parrot him, but what do you expect? It’s not like they’re journalists. So, they quote Piatak as saying “Jews,” when he really said, “multiculturalists”? Same difference, right?
Blumenthal is the purported son of former Clinton administration employee, Sidney Blumenthal, then affectionately referred to as “Sid Vicious.” During the 1996 presidential campaign, Sid was stationed at the DNC’s New Yorker Division, from where he would call Bob Dole (Viagra-KS) Campaign HQ, posing as a journalist. The Dole folks would tell Blumenthal things they wouldn’t have told a known Democratic Party operative (no wonder Dole lost the election!). Sid would then immediately call Clinton Re-election HQ, and pass on whatever he had just learned.
(But that’s the least of Sid’s viciousness. Read Michael Isikoff’s note at the bottom of this review of Sid’s apparently unreadable and uninformative, 802-page book, for how Vicious, er, Blumenthal, lied to the media about both the grand jury’s questions and his testimony in the matter of Bill Clinton’s perjury, in order to make himself look good, and to libel Kenneth Starr.)
Max is also employed by the Party, at its Daily Beast Division, another project by Democratic serial magazine killer, Tina Brown, who was busy wrecking the New Yorker Division’s finances, when she and Sid were both there. Like purported father, like purported son.
Although Max looks like a soccer hooligan, I know nothing about his demeanor, or whether he is prone to violence. For all I know, he may well limit his thuggery to his typing.
Keith Olbermann is a retired sportscaster, who is presently employed by the Party’s MSNBC Division. His chief talent resides in having a very loud voice, with which to shout his talking points.
For all that Max and Keith said, in publicizing VDARE, there is, however, one thing that they forgot to say: Please support VDARE!
VDARE is sponsored by the VDARE Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity; your contributions are tax-deductible.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Please Support VDARE
By Nicholas Stix
(As part of my contribution to the Christmas fundraising drive this year, like last year, I am replaying my "greatest hits" fundraising letters. This one is from 2006.)
Last updated at 2:50 a.m., 25 December 2006.
It’s that time of year again. You are bound to be inundated with telephone calls from the “National Police Officers’ Association,” or some such scam, which will claim to helping out the widows and children of police officers slain in the line of duty, organizations which virtually never contribute one dime to the welfare of police officers or their families. But one organization, which does not engage in cold calling, in order to fleece the unwary good-hearted, and which, in fact, is indispensable, is VDARE.
Not only is VDARE (those mysterious typos, notwithstanding) the best-written Web site that I know of, it is the indispensable Web site, which has had more of a positive effect than any 200 GOP talking points sites (some of which are edited by would-be political consultants) combined.
VDARE is devoted to the National Question. As in, shall the United States of America endure, and what is necessary to do, in order to ensure that it does? Since presently, the greatest threat to the continued existence of these United States is mass immigration, legal and illegal, immigration is VDARE’s preoccupation.
How important is VDARE? Pat Buchanan’s just released work, State of Emergency, is easily the most important immigration book written since Michelle Malkin’s Invasion, four years ago. (It may be the most important book since VDARE founder Peter Brimelow’s 1995 work, Alien Nation.) The impeccable statistical research Buchanan cites in State of Emergency was provided by statistician Edwin Rubinstein, a regular VDARE columnist. And when the standard-setting report on race in America, The State of White America, appears later this month, it too will have statistical foundations provided by Ed Rubinstein.
[2008 P.S.: You can download The State of White America-2007 for free, along with other, meticulously researched reports, at the National Policy Institute.]
But that’s not all, folks.
Steve Sailer, another regular VDARE columnist, may well be the most brilliant intellectual-journalist working in the English language today.
[2008 P.S.: You can purchase Steve's just-published book, America's Half Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance", by hitting this link.]
But there’s more. VDARE also showcases work written exclusively for it by columnists Bryanna Bevens, Allan Wall, James Fulford, Joe Guzzardi, Juan Mann, Donald A. Collins, Brenda Walker and Athena Kerry.
A listing of just a few of its exposés (including two from yours truly) follows:
S. 2611 Amnesty/Open Borders/Immigration Acceleration Bill – VDARE helped galvanize opposition that shelved the bill for now, and exposed the Pence Plan by Cong. Mike Pence (R-Indiana), that sought to backdoor amnesty, while claiming to be a “rational middle ground.”
Misrepresenting the Hispanic Vote: Steve Sailer has for several years continually exposed the myths whereby not only the socialist MSM, but their Republican counterparts, not to mention politicians from both major parties have proceeded as if Hispanics’ votes somehow counted for more than whites’ votes.
Naming Open Border Lobby names: VDARE writers have shown how low the OBL will sink, in order to defend the indefensible, such as in Patrick Cleburne’s exposé of Colorado horse farm owner Helen Krieble’s agitations for amnesty, whereby Krieble seeks to depress the wages she has to pay her workers.
VDAWDI: With his VDARE American Worker Displacement Index, Edwin S. Rubenstein has kept a monthly tab on the rise of “immigrant” employment, and concurrent decline in the employment of Americans.
EOIR: In what he should have turned into a book by now, immigration attorney and VDARE columnist Juan Mann has shown how the Executive Office of Immigration Review has undermined the enforcement of immigration law.
America’s Worst Immigration Journalist: VDARE columnist Joe Guzzardi presides over one of the fiercest journalism competitions in existence: determining who, of all the shamelessly dishonest open borders shills, is the worst.
God & Girl at a Catholic University: Athena Kerry’s series showed the decline into multicultural nihilism of one once proudly Catholic institution.
Diversity is Strength! It’s Also … Police Corruption: In 1995, the New York City Police Department hired illegal alien Martin Peters. When Peters came under suspicion in the murder of the mother of his child, and the NYPD showed reticence about promoting him to sergeant, Peters who played the race card, and got his promotion. Sgt. Peters is now under indictment for Murder in the Second Degree, Assault in the First Degree, Intimidating a Witness in the Third Degree, Menacing in the Second Degree, three counts of Criminal Possession of a Weapon in the Second Degree, defrauding HUD out of $38,724 in rent subsidies, bankruptcy fraud and last, but not least, immigration fraud.
“Disappearing” Urban Crime: shows the methods of statistical fraud the NYPD employs to make New York “America’s Safest Big City.”
The VDARE Blog: VDARE has one of the best blogs on the Web, with steady contributions from its regular columnists, plus bloggers Patrick Cleburne and Randall Burns.
If you doubt me, try for yourself!
Syndicated columnists: VDARE also runs and archives the columns of Pat Buchanan and Michelle Malkin. So, what’s the big deal about running columns you can read anywhere? The big deal is that nowhere else can you read these columns with the encyclopedic links that VDARE’s editors weave into the text.
Sam Francis: Over the past twenty or so years, Sam Francis was one of America's most important political thinkers, and one of her few honest writers on race. Francis died on February 15, 2005 of complications following heart surgery, at the age of 57. But during his brief stay in this vale of tears, Francis was as prolific as he was insightful. And all of the approximately 400 columns he wrote for VDARE are still available at his VDARE archive, which also contains links to obituaries honoring him, to his work for Chronicles magazine and townhall.com, and to the newly published collection of some of his work. This archive is a treasure trove.
Donate: Please give to VDARE. If you do so by December 31, you can write your contribution off your 2006 taxes. And tax write-offs aside, giving to VDARE is, in the words of one of my favorite ex-convicts, A good thing.
By Nicholas Stix
(As part of my contribution to the Christmas fundraising drive this year, like last year, I am replaying my "greatest hits" fundraising letters. This one is from 2006.)
Last updated at 2:50 a.m., 25 December 2006.
It’s that time of year again. You are bound to be inundated with telephone calls from the “National Police Officers’ Association,” or some such scam, which will claim to helping out the widows and children of police officers slain in the line of duty, organizations which virtually never contribute one dime to the welfare of police officers or their families. But one organization, which does not engage in cold calling, in order to fleece the unwary good-hearted, and which, in fact, is indispensable, is VDARE.
Not only is VDARE (those mysterious typos, notwithstanding) the best-written Web site that I know of, it is the indispensable Web site, which has had more of a positive effect than any 200 GOP talking points sites (some of which are edited by would-be political consultants) combined.
VDARE is devoted to the National Question. As in, shall the United States of America endure, and what is necessary to do, in order to ensure that it does? Since presently, the greatest threat to the continued existence of these United States is mass immigration, legal and illegal, immigration is VDARE’s preoccupation.
How important is VDARE? Pat Buchanan’s just released work, State of Emergency, is easily the most important immigration book written since Michelle Malkin’s Invasion, four years ago. (It may be the most important book since VDARE founder Peter Brimelow’s 1995 work, Alien Nation.) The impeccable statistical research Buchanan cites in State of Emergency was provided by statistician Edwin Rubinstein, a regular VDARE columnist. And when the standard-setting report on race in America, The State of White America, appears later this month, it too will have statistical foundations provided by Ed Rubinstein.
[2008 P.S.: You can download The State of White America-2007 for free, along with other, meticulously researched reports, at the National Policy Institute.]
But that’s not all, folks.
Steve Sailer, another regular VDARE columnist, may well be the most brilliant intellectual-journalist working in the English language today.
[2008 P.S.: You can purchase Steve's just-published book, America's Half Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance", by hitting this link.]
But there’s more. VDARE also showcases work written exclusively for it by columnists Bryanna Bevens, Allan Wall, James Fulford, Joe Guzzardi, Juan Mann, Donald A. Collins, Brenda Walker and Athena Kerry.
A listing of just a few of its exposés (including two from yours truly) follows:
S. 2611 Amnesty/Open Borders/Immigration Acceleration Bill – VDARE helped galvanize opposition that shelved the bill for now, and exposed the Pence Plan by Cong. Mike Pence (R-Indiana), that sought to backdoor amnesty, while claiming to be a “rational middle ground.”
Misrepresenting the Hispanic Vote: Steve Sailer has for several years continually exposed the myths whereby not only the socialist MSM, but their Republican counterparts, not to mention politicians from both major parties have proceeded as if Hispanics’ votes somehow counted for more than whites’ votes.
Naming Open Border Lobby names: VDARE writers have shown how low the OBL will sink, in order to defend the indefensible, such as in Patrick Cleburne’s exposé of Colorado horse farm owner Helen Krieble’s agitations for amnesty, whereby Krieble seeks to depress the wages she has to pay her workers.
VDAWDI: With his VDARE American Worker Displacement Index, Edwin S. Rubenstein has kept a monthly tab on the rise of “immigrant” employment, and concurrent decline in the employment of Americans.
EOIR: In what he should have turned into a book by now, immigration attorney and VDARE columnist Juan Mann has shown how the Executive Office of Immigration Review has undermined the enforcement of immigration law.
America’s Worst Immigration Journalist: VDARE columnist Joe Guzzardi presides over one of the fiercest journalism competitions in existence: determining who, of all the shamelessly dishonest open borders shills, is the worst.
God & Girl at a Catholic University: Athena Kerry’s series showed the decline into multicultural nihilism of one once proudly Catholic institution.
Diversity is Strength! It’s Also … Police Corruption: In 1995, the New York City Police Department hired illegal alien Martin Peters. When Peters came under suspicion in the murder of the mother of his child, and the NYPD showed reticence about promoting him to sergeant, Peters who played the race card, and got his promotion. Sgt. Peters is now under indictment for Murder in the Second Degree, Assault in the First Degree, Intimidating a Witness in the Third Degree, Menacing in the Second Degree, three counts of Criminal Possession of a Weapon in the Second Degree, defrauding HUD out of $38,724 in rent subsidies, bankruptcy fraud and last, but not least, immigration fraud.
“Disappearing” Urban Crime: shows the methods of statistical fraud the NYPD employs to make New York “America’s Safest Big City.”
The VDARE Blog: VDARE has one of the best blogs on the Web, with steady contributions from its regular columnists, plus bloggers Patrick Cleburne and Randall Burns.
If you doubt me, try for yourself!
Syndicated columnists: VDARE also runs and archives the columns of Pat Buchanan and Michelle Malkin. So, what’s the big deal about running columns you can read anywhere? The big deal is that nowhere else can you read these columns with the encyclopedic links that VDARE’s editors weave into the text.
Sam Francis: Over the past twenty or so years, Sam Francis was one of America's most important political thinkers, and one of her few honest writers on race. Francis died on February 15, 2005 of complications following heart surgery, at the age of 57. But during his brief stay in this vale of tears, Francis was as prolific as he was insightful. And all of the approximately 400 columns he wrote for VDARE are still available at his VDARE archive, which also contains links to obituaries honoring him, to his work for Chronicles magazine and townhall.com, and to the newly published collection of some of his work. This archive is a treasure trove.
Donate: Please give to VDARE. If you do so by December 31, you can write your contribution off your 2006 taxes. And tax write-offs aside, giving to VDARE is, in the words of one of my favorite ex-convicts, A good thing.
Monday, December 08, 2008
American Anthems: The Music of Aaron Copland
By Nicholas Stix
Assigned for the first time to teach philosophy, I faced a daunting task: Making Hegel's irrational yet hugely influential metaphysics of the synthesis of opposites understandable to undergraduates of, um, modest gifts. Aaron Copland to the rescue! I played a tape of Copland's 1942 Lincoln Portrait, in which a variation on "Camptown Races" representing the South (point), and a brass-and-percussion evocation of a cavalry charge representing the North (counterpoint), fuse into the "new birth of freedom" and national rapprochement of Lincoln's sublime Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural, respectively. Alas, music can do what neither politics nor logic can.
University of Houston music professor Howard Pollock's ambitious, uneven book, Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man, while occasionally indulging in academic nonsense, is redeemed by the author's encyclopedic knowledge, informed affection for Copland's (1900-1990) person and music, and Pollock's ability, more often than not, to write technically sophisticated musical analyses without obscuring the music.
Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn, educated in Paris, and lived in the American grain. We still live enveloped in his sounds: His 1942 ballet, Rodeo, hawks beef; the then obscure Shaker song, "Simple Gifts" (ca. 1848), that he worked into his most famous ballet, Appalachian Spring (1944), accompanies airline ads; and his short, 1942 work, Fanfare for the Common Man, has ennobled spots for New York's Museum of Natural History, and the Trinidad and Tobago TV show, Panorama, alike.
More important is the spell Copland's music has cast over other artists. For but one example, in Hugo Friedhofer’s Oscar-winning score to William Wyler's 1946 masterpiece, The Best Years of Our Lives, Friedhofer took an uptempo theme from Copland's 1938 ballet, Billy the Kid, evoking western town (as opposed to much slower farm) life, and made it slow and wistful, to express three returning veterans' problems readjusting to small-town life in Michigan. Much later, John Rubenstein adapted the same theme for the epic ABC drama, China Beach (1988-1991), to contrast wandering, lost Vietnam veterans' similar struggles with civilian routine with their intense, purposeful years "in country."
The best thing about Howard Pollock's book is its repudiation of the highbrow assumptions that popular music is somehow "derivative," orchestral music "original," and each at odds with the other.
Pollock's painstaking, chronological analyses show how Copland's "serious" works often derived from his more popular ones, and that some of his most ambitious pieces, e.g., the score to the 1949 film, The Red Pony, were composed for popular venues. In his Oscar-winning score for William Wyler's 1949 film, The Heiress, based on Henry James' story, "Washington Square," Copland had to portray a sensibility very unlike the robust attitudes he had been associated with. He came to depict feminine emotions with a delicacy new to Hollywood. That same, new delicacy suffused Copland's critically acclaimed Dickinson Songs, based on twelve Emily Dickinson poems, the following year.
Pollock's worst flaw is his occasional embrace of academic "queer theory." He calls "intriguing" idiotic notions advanced by K. Robert Schwartz, Susan McClary, and Mark Levine, who claimed that the postwar music that Americans emotionally responded to was somehow "gay music," adding, "More generally, the dialectical complexities of Copland's work arguably incorporate not only a Marxist perspective but the kinds of 'binarisms' characteristic of modernist homosexual-identified literature as explored by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick." Huh?!
In alternately affirming, demolishing, and reaffirming such lunacy, Pollock seems either spineless or cynical: "However intriguing such notions may be, they failed to illuminate the wide variety of styles and aesthetics among gay and straight composers alike."
Pollock discusses responses to Copland's "Jewishness" by early critics who projected their anti-Semitism onto his music, but fails to see the same phenomenon afoot in contemporary theorists' similarly tone-deaf insistence on "queering" Copland's music, based merely on the fact that he was a homosexual. (But aren’t we all?)
Aaron Copland strove always to create a quintessentially "American music." As Pollock points out, in Copland's most popular works, such as Appalachian Spring, the composer's "Americanism" might involve quoting from American folk music, i.e., "Simple Gifts," making allusions to other works, and finally, creating the illusion of derivativeness, by seeming to quote tunes, when he is in fact creating his own.
Pollock sees a second meaning to Americanism of "vastness" -- of solitary prairies and lonely cities -- but this sounds too vague and metaphysical to me.
Finally, following the author's hero, composer and Copland-friend Walter Piston (1894-1976), Pollock suggests that Copland's own ambiguity about the phrase "American music" gave it an even vaguer, third meaning: American music is anything that an American composes (to which I would add: which is not simply derivative of a foreign composer's music). But that would trivialize musical character as being no more than the matter of a composer having an American passport.
Ultimately, I think, Copland used the myth of an existing, distinctively American idiom, in order to create such an idiom.
In seeming contravention of logic, Aaron Copland can seem, musically, at any given moment to be any given thing to any given listener, but not all things to all listeners at all times. But then, amid his sophistication, he had gained true simplicity:
Postscript: This essay was commissioned by a major, conservative magazine in 1999. In preparing it for publication, however, an assistant editor cut it from 900 to 600 words, making it unpublishable. The book editor was a gentleman, however, and while most publications pay "kill fees" of one-third to one-half the publication fee, he paid the full publication fee of $200.
By Nicholas Stix
Assigned for the first time to teach philosophy, I faced a daunting task: Making Hegel's irrational yet hugely influential metaphysics of the synthesis of opposites understandable to undergraduates of, um, modest gifts. Aaron Copland to the rescue! I played a tape of Copland's 1942 Lincoln Portrait, in which a variation on "Camptown Races" representing the South (point), and a brass-and-percussion evocation of a cavalry charge representing the North (counterpoint), fuse into the "new birth of freedom" and national rapprochement of Lincoln's sublime Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural, respectively. Alas, music can do what neither politics nor logic can.
University of Houston music professor Howard Pollock's ambitious, uneven book, Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man, while occasionally indulging in academic nonsense, is redeemed by the author's encyclopedic knowledge, informed affection for Copland's (1900-1990) person and music, and Pollock's ability, more often than not, to write technically sophisticated musical analyses without obscuring the music.
Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn, educated in Paris, and lived in the American grain. We still live enveloped in his sounds: His 1942 ballet, Rodeo, hawks beef; the then obscure Shaker song, "Simple Gifts" (ca. 1848), that he worked into his most famous ballet, Appalachian Spring (1944), accompanies airline ads; and his short, 1942 work, Fanfare for the Common Man, has ennobled spots for New York's Museum of Natural History, and the Trinidad and Tobago TV show, Panorama, alike.
More important is the spell Copland's music has cast over other artists. For but one example, in Hugo Friedhofer’s Oscar-winning score to William Wyler's 1946 masterpiece, The Best Years of Our Lives, Friedhofer took an uptempo theme from Copland's 1938 ballet, Billy the Kid, evoking western town (as opposed to much slower farm) life, and made it slow and wistful, to express three returning veterans' problems readjusting to small-town life in Michigan. Much later, John Rubenstein adapted the same theme for the epic ABC drama, China Beach (1988-1991), to contrast wandering, lost Vietnam veterans' similar struggles with civilian routine with their intense, purposeful years "in country."
The best thing about Howard Pollock's book is its repudiation of the highbrow assumptions that popular music is somehow "derivative," orchestral music "original," and each at odds with the other.
Pollock's painstaking, chronological analyses show how Copland's "serious" works often derived from his more popular ones, and that some of his most ambitious pieces, e.g., the score to the 1949 film, The Red Pony, were composed for popular venues. In his Oscar-winning score for William Wyler's 1949 film, The Heiress, based on Henry James' story, "Washington Square," Copland had to portray a sensibility very unlike the robust attitudes he had been associated with. He came to depict feminine emotions with a delicacy new to Hollywood. That same, new delicacy suffused Copland's critically acclaimed Dickinson Songs, based on twelve Emily Dickinson poems, the following year.
Pollock's worst flaw is his occasional embrace of academic "queer theory." He calls "intriguing" idiotic notions advanced by K. Robert Schwartz, Susan McClary, and Mark Levine, who claimed that the postwar music that Americans emotionally responded to was somehow "gay music," adding, "More generally, the dialectical complexities of Copland's work arguably incorporate not only a Marxist perspective but the kinds of 'binarisms' characteristic of modernist homosexual-identified literature as explored by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick." Huh?!
In alternately affirming, demolishing, and reaffirming such lunacy, Pollock seems either spineless or cynical: "However intriguing such notions may be, they failed to illuminate the wide variety of styles and aesthetics among gay and straight composers alike."
Pollock discusses responses to Copland's "Jewishness" by early critics who projected their anti-Semitism onto his music, but fails to see the same phenomenon afoot in contemporary theorists' similarly tone-deaf insistence on "queering" Copland's music, based merely on the fact that he was a homosexual. (But aren’t we all?)
Aaron Copland strove always to create a quintessentially "American music." As Pollock points out, in Copland's most popular works, such as Appalachian Spring, the composer's "Americanism" might involve quoting from American folk music, i.e., "Simple Gifts," making allusions to other works, and finally, creating the illusion of derivativeness, by seeming to quote tunes, when he is in fact creating his own.
Pollock sees a second meaning to Americanism of "vastness" -- of solitary prairies and lonely cities -- but this sounds too vague and metaphysical to me.
Finally, following the author's hero, composer and Copland-friend Walter Piston (1894-1976), Pollock suggests that Copland's own ambiguity about the phrase "American music" gave it an even vaguer, third meaning: American music is anything that an American composes (to which I would add: which is not simply derivative of a foreign composer's music). But that would trivialize musical character as being no more than the matter of a composer having an American passport.
Ultimately, I think, Copland used the myth of an existing, distinctively American idiom, in order to create such an idiom.
In seeming contravention of logic, Aaron Copland can seem, musically, at any given moment to be any given thing to any given listener, but not all things to all listeners at all times. But then, amid his sophistication, he had gained true simplicity:
'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free,
'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.When true simplicity is gained,
To bow and to bend we shan't be asham'd,
To turn, turn, will be our delight,
'Till by turning, turning we come ... round ... right.
(Simple Gifts)
Postscript: This essay was commissioned by a major, conservative magazine in 1999. In preparing it for publication, however, an assistant editor cut it from 900 to 600 words, making it unpublishable. The book editor was a gentleman, however, and while most publications pay "kill fees" of one-third to one-half the publication fee, he paid the full publication fee of $200.
